10 Famous Novels That Didn’t Win a Pulitzer Prize

The Great Gatsby didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and neither did these modern classics

By Janice Harayda

Consider this if your favorite book doesn’t win one of the Pulitzer prizes that will be announced at 3 p.m. today: The judges for the 1930 prize looked at Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and gave the fiction award to … Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge. And those classics are hardly alone in having been snubbed. Some noteworthy losers and the novels that won the Pulitzer instead in the years listed:

[…] time that no Pulitzer in fiction has been handed out, the first since 1977. Janice Harayda has compiled a list of ten famous American novels that failed to win the Prize, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, […]

Hemingway may not have been the only nominee, but from the list of eligible books I saw, he was by far the most deserving. And he seems to have lost because of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. It’s a reminder of how much politics can influence awards decisions.

[…] I’m still not over the Pulitzer Fiction snub from earlier in the week. But I read this list of famous novels that were also snubbed and, well, I guess their doing okay for themselves. (One Minute Book Reviews) […]

Most of these books are awful, and don’t warrant a second glimpse, let alone an award. “The Catcher in the Rye”? PLEASE. “For Whom the Bell Tolls”? One of the very worst books ever written, I can’t fathom why it should be considered a travesty that a Pulitzer wasn’t awarded to a book that serves no other purpose than to aggrandize Communist totalitarianism and attempt to legitimize their use of firing squads on innocents.